Trees

She’d dance for children
Hiding from their parents men
From their wives women
Young and hopeful from their fathers who
Had come just the night before to see her
Become a tambourine enflame the evening
Shoot her sparks
Like wayward bullets to a moon
That only barely gave her sight
And used the coins to buy a knife
She’d carve the trees
Slice clean through the bark
That slowly gave
Rimmed her fingernails with dirt-flecked
Sap whose smell never left
The rags of her everyday dress
Over a body only half earthly and cut
To cut for cutting leaving
Messages almost dry and freshly
Piney for him she built
Their trysts out of leaves
Rolled crutch twigs between their bodies
And wrapped her songs
In wood she felt every branch
Smash up through her ribs
Bamboo torture and swallowed the sting
As if it were syrup she began
To cry in resin alone
And the yellow tracks down her cheeks
Browned by blood and shadowed sun
Would make a map for him to find her in the dark
Beneath the trees when the world shattered down into
The clay of four greedy hands she
Wrestled thinking he’d build a home beneath
The shelter of her diaphragm
But kept the knife for when he left
And when he did she threw her
Hair out over the sky a last canopy
And severed all her roots to keep
From wondering whether their lights
Were worth a shovel.

(Gap-in-the-story poem about a character in Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer.)